Even children saw this, saw it in the plainest and most brutal clarity, saw humanity exposed in so extreme, so unimaginable an uncomprehending innocence of suffering that we could never wake up from the sight of it again.
So in a true sense I was a different child on either side of my tenth birthday, a week after V-E Day. Till then, and perhaps for the briefest time after, I might still gather the world’s moment to me as if it were my own, still rejoice in what seemed to me a bright entry into personhood, melding the end of the terrible war with my own little coming-of-age.
My mother gave me the rapturous gift of permission to see Victor Mature in One Million B.C. at the Cosmo on the other side of Third Avenue. I doubt she was ever sold on my father’s stern principles in this matter of the movies, and with him away there seems never to have been a question of us going, beyond worrying about the cost of it. Ann would come, and my brothers, of course—they had to—and as for me, always the willing pachyderm at the bottom of the pile, sharing it was the best part of the gift. She couldn’t go, sadly, not with just a single afternoon off to clean house and make pineapple-upside-down cake, but I knew when we got back she’d make sure a bit of the pleasure of it rubbed off.
The primary meaning of the movies, ever since our Dumbo days, had been bonding. There’d been that curious, wonderful night back in Tucson when my father had actually taken us to see Mr. Skeffington—a night I remember both because it was a night and because it was such an unexampled fatherly indulgence. Of course, it had to be a dour morality play—a Bette Davis classic about a vain and selfish wife who contracts diphtheria and loses all her beautiful hair, which I understood even then to be her punishment. But I will never forget the anguish of watching that single false curl drop silently to the carpet, my mother quietly snuffling into her handkerchief beside me as I sobbed my pitying tears into the soft, red-fox collar of her best winter coat.
My birthday movie was another story, One Million B.C. being perhaps the nearest thing Hollywood had come to a skin-flick since the Code. Even the Cosmo theater thought no one under sixteen should see so much flesh draped in such scanty primordial outerwear without an accompanying adult. Somehow we hadn’t known this—certainly my mother hadn’t—and we got as far as the queue before we panicked at the thought of being turned away at the window.
Lou is not quite fifteen and small for his age. Behind us stands a gray-haired woman in a navy-blue jacket and hat. “Would you say we’re with you, lady?” he asks. Widening her dull-blue eyes, “All four o’ yez?” she mouths back, and bounces her head four times, down the string of us. But she smiles, she twinkles, she actually seems pleased to have acquired a family. And she points out that she will have to get ahead of us in line.
Her lie relieved me to the soul. And it occurs to me now that whatever subliminal weakening of our moral fiber took place that afternoon must have taken place at that moment. Otherwise it would have to have been produced by the absolutely bewitching sight of flowing lava over a beautiful, desolate landscape that put me in mind of the Southwest, and probably was. Which is all I can bring back, except for Victor Mature himself, and the distinct, if fleeting thought that he was a much less handsome version of my absent father.
Lou was going to be headed off to Cardinal Hayes High School on scholarship that fall, and as Catholic went I wouldn’t have been surprised if he told me that they’d debated the ethics of our movie matinee in his moral theology class—who, precisely, had committed the sin, what sin it was, if it was mortal or venial, and whether the little blue lady would go to hell if she were Catholic and didn’t confess it, or go to hell because she wasn’t Catholic no matter whether she confessed it or not.
Sometimes I could just not figure out the things priests and nuns typically got worked up over, like how much skin you exposed in your confirmation dress, or whether you wore a proper scarf to church instead of the make-do little handkerchief with a bobbypin, or brought in your little donation envelope for the basket on Sundays or went to the 9 A.M. mass to get properly sermonized by the pastor. I wish I’d known that scriptural saying about the gnats and elephants, since with all that was going on in the world I thought they seemed to be digesting a bellyful of elephant as if it were cherry Jell-O.
All I knew was that before I started the fifth grade at Our Lady Queen of Angels on East 113th Street, I’d had four years of school, two public sandwiched between two parochial, and public was way out front in the standings. On my first day at St. Gabriel’s when I was five, the nun-principal had struck such terror into my little body that I’d peed, hot and wet, right into the cane chair in her office, and it was as if I’d spent the whole year after that expecting the imminent loss of bladder control. Whereas I had loved my little two-room public schoolhouse teachers in the desert, especially the one—hardy and plain, tanned as leather—who taught third grade in the adobe school we were yellow-bused to at the edge of the Hopi reservation. She had never been bound to rules for their own sake. She had even worn jeans to school sometimes. And we’d worked hard—hard work being far from just a Catholic school discipline, though you’d have thought it was from the way people carried on about the difference. I loved to work—what else did you do, after all, if you were the fat, smart, artsy girl who was always in love with somebody, but nobody was ever in love with? The teacher was always asking me to draw something on the construction-paper covers of her string-tied little manuals. When she saw I could also read and count beyond my age and class, she’d put me to tutoring other kids, a bonus for me, who could see from age eight that teaching was also a better way of learning.
Then there was a month or two of fourth grade with Sister Agnes at Saints Peter and Paul in Tucson, that brief spell just before we came back east. Sensitive as I was to names, I didn’t think hers beautiful enough for her. Her beauty astonished me, the young face smooth and smiling between the tight, snow-white bands, great, carved brown eyes dancing as she proudly watched me produce a perfect cylinder of Palmer Os, in one big looping curl like a Slinky, out of a single dip of a fine-nibbed pen in the inkwell.
Our Lady Queen of Angels, enclave of Franciscan friars in brown cloaks and rope belts and of a teaching order of the Sisters of Mercy, was sheer Lowood by comparison. In fact, reading Jane Eyre as a teenager, I had the advantage of a perfect reference point for the misery both of Jane and of Helen Burns, because, while I suffered myself, it was much less than my poor sister Ann, who had always needed gentleness more than I did and took any rebuke as a hurt to heart and soul. And ironically it was also her misery that in the end released me. Plagued with colds and earaches and terrible bouts of tonsillitis almost from the moment we were back in New York, she’d been laid up at home again and again all winter, and I had become her runner, fetching assignments home from school and carrying her finished homework back to Sister Agrippina.
Agrippina! If only I’d known the atrocity embedded in the history of that name, it might at least have given me a perspective on her sadism—for what else could have possessed her to invoke the mother of Caligula as she took the veil? One afternoon as I stood in front of her second-grade class with the news that my sister was sick again, she reached into Ann’s desk for all her notebooks and threw them across the room, spilling their pages onto the floor at my feet. Then she made me get down and collect them again. I wept, humiliated, furious, both in front of the snickering children and all the way home, remembering her big voice roaring, “Sick! Sick! Your sister is out sick every time the wind blows!”
It didn’t occur to me then how much Ann’s illness might actually have been a counteroffensive in a kind of war, her only weapon against Sister Agrippina’s relentless mental and even physical bullying. I knew only that Sister Agrippina was a tyrant, that my little sister was sick, and that it was mean and unjust for her to be accused of malingering.
My mother, whose outrage could be as swift, clean, and incisive as the blow of a cleaver on the neck of a frying chicken, could hardly wait for dawn to march over to the school and deliver what was known in the stairwell at 230 as “a piece of her mind.” Sister Agrippina, believe me, was never going to be caught harming a single brown curl of little Ann’s head or speaking to her in a voice above a murmur. But in an exquisitely twisted gesture of retribution, I was the one my mother pulled out.